Strangeness!!
 

Greetings true believers,

I wanted to share this bizarre behavior that I encountered installing Jaguar with others. Has anyone else seen something similar to this?

I've got Jaguar running on 10 Macs now with about 10x that planned for the very near future. At the moment, I have a G4 PCI graphics sitting here next to me that I was using to build a Jaguar disk for my boss. I've got some Jaguar CDs that came with an iMac we purchased. I threw in a new disk, formatted it, installed OS 9.2.2 first, and then installed Jaguar over the top of it. Made my default admin user (note: 1 user now) and started installing apps. Somewhere along the line I decided to add my boss in as a user (note: 2 users now) and then go back to installing apps. Strangely, when I logged back in as myself (the default user) and I tried to install another app, I got the 'not enough privileges' message. Whhaa? So I take a peek around and check my permissions in the Get Info window. Rather than seeing the default user name as owner of this app with the (Me) next to it.. there's Chinese character as my user name. What the heck? I check further in the list and the www user is now blank in that select bar. It's still there and selectable, it's just blank. Off to the terminal app to see what Darwin says. Everything is normal. Permissions are normal, owners are normal. The mystery deepens! Off to Netinfo Manager to see what it says. Users all look normal. Groups normal. Back to the get info window. Now it's character-placeholders-that-look-like-boxs-when-the-font-doesn't-have-that-character mixed with Chinese characters. I click on the little lock button and before my eyes, the user "name" changes again! D'oh!

Let the experimentation begin.

Firmware update the G4. Doesn't need it, it's all up to date. Upgrade the default install with the patches from Apple. Still messed up. It's late, fine, let's just try that little 'clean install' aspect they've included in Jaguar. It's worked so well for me in 9 in the past! No, I don't want the Users saved. La-dee-da, ok done. Create default admin user (note: 1 user now). Wheeoo. All fixed! Great! Let's create my bosses user (note: 2 users now) right now. One of those 3rd party apps I installed must have been buggy. Just clean Apple only apps for the time being and see what happens. What the?!? My user is all screwy again! Pop in the Jaguar CD, reboot to CD, run Disk Utility, fix the disk. Problems fixed. Reboot. User still screwed up. Reboot to CD, run Disk Utility, fix the permissions. Reboot. OK at least now I can erase and install again, however my user's name is still screwy. Try logging in as my boss' user, now both my user and the www user are blank in the Get Info window. Still there, just blank. Fine, two can play that game. What haven't I done yet? OK, create another user (note: 3 users now), log in as that user and check it out. Everything is fine. All user names appear as they are supposed to. Hmm. Delete user (note: 2 users now). Go back, log in as myself, all screwed up again. D'oh! OK, I've narrowed it now. I create another bogus user (note: 3 users now). I stay logged in as myself and check permissions. Everything is normal. I create another user (note: 4 users now). Username is back to being screwy. Jinkies! A real clue! Odd number of users, everything is fine. Even number of users, everything is messy. (Side note: Enabling root does not affect it either way.)

Let the experimentation continue.

Well now that I've solved that.. let's check other machines I've installed Jaguar on. All the G4s that were previously running 10.1.x, all fine. A G3 and a G3 with a G4 upgrade card.. screwy. Erase the disk that started it all. Install 10.1.x. Upgrade with the Jaguar CDs. Screwy. One final erase and install just Jaguar from the CDs. Screwy. OK, so the CDs must be bad, or there's some weirdness in the iMac build that will let you install on other model machines and won't complain. So I finally call Apple. After jumping through the typical first line of defense hoops and a little bit of hold time, I am reminded that the packages included in a Jaguar CD for an iMac might install on another model, but may have "unforeseen and unknown consequences". Yeah, I might have seen something like that.

OK, so now I'm waiting on a universal Jaguar installer to enter into my hot little hands. In the meantime I got a build of Jaguar installers for a G4. And can you guess what? STILL SCREWY. For the time being, my solution is to have an odd number of users on each effected system until I can get the vanilla version of Jaguar.

Has anyone else seen this or something similar to it?

Jacques

Update:
 

Well I got the vanilla install disk of Jaguar. What do you know? SCREWY. And I checked around, this problem manifests itself on every other computer we have from a blueberry G3 to a 17" flatpanel iMac. I'm on the phone with Apple right now waiting for the next level support fellow. This should be fun! :)

Jacques

Best of luck! Keep us posted.

Update 2
 

So, the Software Specialist couldn't reproduce it where she was. And she'd handed it off to the Apple engineers. On the few machines that I upgraded to Jaguar with first generation build CDs (i.e., only 10.2.1 on there) this problem doesn't seem to exist. It really does with the latter day builds of the installer CD. However, I maintain that this is not a fluke. Keep you posted!
Jacques

Is this screenshot similar to the Chinese character's you're getting with your user name? I just started getting them too. So far, I think everything's running smoothly. I had some strange things last night, but I believe I got them resolved.

FWIW, I added a second user yesterday. Maybe I should add a third?

YES!
 

Holy Smokeroonies!
That is exactlly the problem that I have been having. Try adding another user and see if it goes away.

Then, I beg of you to call Apple so they can see that I'm not just some crackpot making it up. :D

Jacques

Very ODD indeed
 

Yuppers, adding a third user "fixed" the anomaly. It puts a whole new meaning to the idea of odd. :p

So does this mean Apple discriminates against even numbered users? I know they like to be a bit different, but they insist we also be odd? :D

Yeah, my call would tell them that there are TWO crackpots making this up. :D I wonder what they'll do when they have to deal with an even number of reports? LOL!

Seriously, I don't believe this is harming anything. It appears to be a simple anomaly in the display. But who knows for sure.

Ah-Ha!
 

Hehe!

Of the 20+ odd times I've reinstalled and fiddled with this it's only caused me easily discernable problems 4 or 5 times. In these cases, I didn't have the privileges to install, remove, and change ownership on these apps. The other 75% of the time, there isn't any real trouble with it. Typically it may not actually do harm to anything, but I'd rather not take the chance! Plus, it is a bug and really should be taken care of. It's nice to know that I'm not seeing things!
Thanks for checking into this Vicki!

Jacques

Agreed that it needs to be reported and corrected. In the meantime, I'm sticking with my ODD number of user accounts. :)

Oh, and next time you talk to Apple, inform them that you are not alone:

http://discussions.info.apple.com/We...Ki.6@.3bbd07f3

Hi, I'm Wes42, one of the posters in that discussions.info.apple.com thread.

Thanks Vicki for the heads up! :D

I added a third user account to my system and the problem is longer there!

The one thing that is different in my case that seems to be different from what you and yellow experienced is that I started experiencing the permissions encoding problem when I only had 1 account. I suspect now that if I had just logged out and logged back in again, the problem would have gone away. But I created a 2nd account to see if this was a system-wide problem or just local to one account. The 2nd account had no problems but according to Murphy I had stepped into his clever trap and the 1st account was now permanently afflicted.
LOL

Yellow, do you have a case number from Apple? It might speed things up when I call Apple to report this problem and workaround.

The OL-EVEN-IS-BAD-ODD-IS-GOOD trick! I should have known better! It happened to me 20 years ago when I was called to a customer site to fix a communication problem involving serial ports on a computer used to monitor factory floor sensors. There were about 16 serial ports and half of them stopped functioning. I was tearing my hair out trying to figure it out, going through the software with a debugger line by line. Finally, I just reconfigured the connections to the sensors to the serial ports that were working properly and told the plant manager to order new serial boards and went on my way. A week later, just by a lucky coincidence I was looking for a bug fix reports from the computer manufacturer for something unrelated, and saw a bug report about an upgrade to the OS serial port drivers that caused all the even-numbered ports to be nonfunctional. LOL! It had been staring me right in the face, I just didn't think to register the serial ports as tt0, tt1, tt2, etc., when looking for a pattern to the problem. That guy who introduced that bug in the serial port drivers? He's working for Apple now! LOL.

Update - 3
 

Still no word from Apple.

Same problem since September (10.2)
 

Hi yellow.

I've had the same problem since September after the installation of 10.2, and my installation disk has only been vanilla. (See the post in this same Forum entitled: "What does it show for 'owner' in "Get Info"?" It should be towards the top since I just updated that post, by chance, a day or two ago, saying that the problem persisted past a disk erasure and partitioning).

However, I ordered another Jaguar installation disk for my machine at work (I knew they would never upgrade, I felt it was essential since I have to exist on a Windows network, and being in Education, it was $69). Well, I don't have this problem on my work machine.

I have a conjecture that the bug has something to do with where the shortname falls alphabetically. My shortnames on my work machine lie below P. My shortname on my home machine (where the problem occurs) is 'us'. The person who responded to my thread mentioned above who also had the problem had a shortname of 'victor'. Look at the posters in this thread: wes, vicki, yellow (of course I don't know that these are what your shortnames are). Anyway, as someone asked me to do in my thread, from the Terminal, 'ls -al' shows the correct shortname for the owner of all these files, so it is likely just a bug in the "Get Info" window's view of things.

Ed

Actually, this occured to me and I tested if it was some bug in the login naming convention, and it still happened with login names beginning with A - D (I gave up at that point). To me it seems to be some hardware fluke, as this doesn't happen with my G4 DP500 at work, nor my G4 867 at home, nor any of the ten G4 900s that I've installed it on. It has happened with all G3s I've tried, a G3 with a G4 500 upgrade card, two G4 500 AGP, and 2 new iMacs (17"). As of now I've still not heard anything from Apple, but I plan on calling my contact engineeer there today for an update. I will keep it posted.

Just for information-sake:

My machine at home (where the problem exists) is a G3 and my machine at work (where the problem does not occur) is a G4.

Well lookit that, more people with my problem. To add more potential confusion to the pot, I've got X running on 2 PCI Graphics G4s, 2 333Mhz Rev. D iMacs, one Quicksilver 733, and one Quicksilver DP1000.

All have the exact same set of users, all but one are running 10.2.3 (the G4 700 has 10.2.1), and only one of them--one of the two identical rev D iMacs--has the garbled owner problem.

I haven't seen any noticable effects of it, but I am getting some oddball errors preventing me from backing up some of the documents on that machine over the network using Synk. I'm mildly suspicious this might be a symptom of the same problem, but it could also just be a coincidence (I've seen other permissions-related issues cause similar problems).

i got the same problems, but i only noticed them after i had fink install passwd, putting the total user count (with system users) at 21 (I have lots of friends who ssh in to my box). I noticed it on account with the short name "admin" the alphabetically first 2 users dont even appear (admin and bjorn). there is a glyph, and (Me) at the top. the next space is blank, but if i select it, i am prompted for a password, and then a new glyph next to me appears.

I deleted a fink user account, down to 20, and all was normal. I am running a b&w G3.

Strange, in all instances I've encountered this bug, having an even number of users (according to the "Accounts" prefpane, built in system users don't count against this number) cause the problem to manifest itself. Could you do us a favor and count the created users in the "Accounts" prefpane? Thanks!

There are 6 which appear in the Accounts prefpane both now, and when i had more users from fink. if i add another via the ppane, bringing the Accounts total to 7, and the system total to 21, then i get the glyphs back again.

I also have an odd number of users on the affected system--15, according to the Accounts prefpane. More frustratingly, both of the otherwise identical iMac 333s have 15 users, and they are in fact identical sets with the exception of a couple in a different order.

This might provide a clue, though: I am using the "Sharepoints" control panel to create network-only users with no home directory. On the funked-up system (and the others) there are only two "real" user accounts, satisfying the even number "rule". Adding a third immediately fixes the glitch, and deleting that account causes it to return.

Accounts created using some non-standard tool (Fink, etc) seem to be something of a common thread here. I sure wish it was happening more consistantly, though--at least that would make sense.

FWIW, I tested this problem so heavily, I don't think fink has any baring on it at all. This porblem would manifest itself on a completely vanilla system.